Category Archives: AutoCAD

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 4, efficiency

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This is the fourth post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post is about BricsCAD being more efficient than AutoCAD for some of the things a CAD Manager might need to do. What do I mean?

  • BricsCAD starts up and closes down faster than AutoCAD, much faster in some environments. If your AutoCAD starts up slow (e.g. in some secure proxy server environments), pretty much any job you need to do to a user’s drawing that involves getting in, doing something quick, saving and getting out again is likely to be finished in BricsCAD before AutoCAD is even open.
  • If you perform a more complex operation on behalf of a user that is likely to take a while, there’s a better-than-even chance that BricsCAD will do it quicker than AutoCAD. In some cases it will do it much quicker (e.g. drawing compare).
  • BricsCAD tends to be able to cope with large drawings while using less memory than AutoCAD. If you have a user with a huge drawing who can’t work with it any more in AutoCAD and you need to split, purge or simplify it before it is usable, the very process of doing that in AutoCAD can itself be unworkably slow. Try the same thing in BricsCAD and there’s a good chance you’ll get the job done in a fraction of the time and without the same level of frustration.
  • If you perform a batch process that operaties on a set of drawings, under most circumstances it will be finished in BricsCAD well before the same thing is done in AutoCAD. Maybe this means you can process a set of drawings over lunch rather than wasting all afternoon on them or waiting until home time before setting the batch going. Plus you’re occupying a cheap BricsCAD license rather than an expensive AutoCAD one. Also, because BricsCAD uses much less RAM than AutoCAD while running, you can run your batch processes on that old PC sitting in the corner rather than having your top user sitting around watching your top spec PC grind away.
  • Certain user interface structures in BricsCAD are much more logically arranged and efficient to use than the AutoCAD equivalents. For example, if you have a drawing with an obscure setting that needs changing, unless you have an impeccable memory, you’ll find that setting much more quickly using the BricsCAD Settings command.

As I mentioned in my last post, this series is all based on stuff I’ve done in real life as a CAD Manager for a primarily AutoCAD-using company. Feel free to add your comments with your own experiences, even if they differ from mine.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and check out the performance and efficiency for yourself.

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 3, parts on demand

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This is the third post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post is about using BricsCAD as a mechanical and structural parts library for your AutoCAD users. As I mentioned in my last post in this series, I was writing a client-specific AutoCAD 3D training course recently. To demonstrate the concept of revolving profiles, and also to compare and contrast different styles of solid creation, I wanted to use a ball bearing as an example. The easiest way for me to get hold of an accurate example ball bearing model was to fire up BricsCAD (a few seconds) and select the part from the Standard Parts panel (a few more seconds).

It gets inserted as a block. After explosion to reduce it to 3D solids, I could then slice it in either BricsCAD or AutoCAD to form the basis for my example. I could save it at any stage in BricsCAD and open it in AutoCAD to continue to work on it seamlessly. What I can’t do is simply copy and paste from one application to another; you do need to save the DWG. You can then open it in AutoCAD or access the blocks using AutoCAD’s DesignCenter palette; if you’re doing this a lot you might want to point DesignCenter to a scratch DWG you keep handy for this sort of parts exchange.

There are currently 13 sets of standards:

Although you may already have your own parts library, having access to a wider range of international standards may prove useful. Aussie steel sections? Go for your life, mate.

Just how much stuff is available? A lot. Each of the sets of standards has multiple sections, each section has many parts, and many of the parts have many sizes. Depending on the part, other parameters (such as bolt length) may also be available for a given size.

Here’s the full Standard Parts panel in action, in this case selecting a nut.

BricsCAD Pro and Platinum have 3D parametrics built in (and given the minor extra cost I’d suggest going for Platinum), so it’s quite feasible to use it as the basis for your own 3D parts library. If you’ve built up a few 2D dynamic blocks in AutoCAD, you’ll be quite capable of doing the same thing in 3D in BricsCAD. The methods are different but straightforward enough to teach yourself.

As pointed out in a comment by James Maeding, you can set up a network license or two and install BricsCAD on everybody’s PC, giving everybody access to the goodies without excessive cost. Bear in mind that like Autodesk, Bricsys charges a premium for a network license over a standalone one. Unlike rent-or-go-forth Autodesk, Bricsys allows you to have a perpetual license and the total cost of ownership is substantially lower.

By the way, this series isn’t theoretical, it’s all based on stuff I’ve tried out in the real world. For example, the network license software will happily coexist with Autodesk’s network license software on the same license server. The services ignore each other; no clash, no problem. My experience is that it works just fine on a virtual server.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and check out the included parts content for yourself.

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 2, 3D operations

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This is the second post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post is about using BricsCAD to do things to help out your AutoCAD users who are having problems with 3D operations. Why would you bother using BricsCAD to mess with AutoCAD 3D models? Because sometimes AutoCAD can’t do stuff with them, and BricsCAD can.

If you have a user who finally asks for help after fighting AutoCAD for ages trying to get an operation to work such as an awkward fillet, a self-intersecting extrusion or a direct edit that doesn’t want to move, you have a couple of options:

  1. fight the same fight yourself in AutoCAD, eventually discover that the user was right, and then construct an excruciatingly awkward workaround; or
  2. fire up BricsCAD and see if you can do it there. There’s a good chance it will. If it does, hand the DWG back to the user with a smug look on your face. If it doesn’t, construct an awkward workaround in BricsCAD, because it will almost certainly be faster than doing the same thing in AutoCAD. Direct editing of 3D solids is more flexible and easier in BricsCAD; the Quad Cursor helps a lot.

I’ve been writing a client-specific AutoCAD 3D training course recently, and going through the exercises I’ve developed has been instructive. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve thought, “Man, this would have been so much easier in BricsCAD.” That’s before we get to the 3D parametrics that BricsCAD has had for a while and which AutoCAD never will.

Why is BricsCAD so much better than AutoCAD at making 3D work well? Because it has to be. When you base your entire product line (including BIM, parametric 3D, sheet metal and a host of other uses covered by 3rd party developers) on a single DWG-based 3D engine, that engine has to be robust, powerful, efficient and fast.

It’s not as if Bricsys can say to somebody struggling with performing 3D operations in BricsCAD that they should be using Inventor or Revit instead. That cop-out is unavailable. It has to just work.

Fortunately, Bricsys has acquired a small group of genius-level experts in this area, and holds on to them rather than dumping them when they get too experienced. It shows. Overwhelmingly, it just works.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and confirm this for yourself. It’s well worth it.

There are exceptions, of course. Nothing is perfect, and you will come across the occasional glitch. But those exceptions are definitely rarer than in AutoCAD. My experience also tells me that if you report those exceptions, there’s an extremely good chance that they will be fixed, and quickly. Bricsys ain’t Autodesk.

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 1, fixing drawings

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Here’s a mega-tip with a lot of experience behind it:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

Why? There are too many reasons to fit in one blog post, so I’m going to do a mini-series. The first post is about using BricsCAD to fix up drawings that are giving your AutoCAD users problems.

One of the things that surprised me most when evaluating BricsCAD as a potential replacement for AutoCAD was that my expectations were wrong when it came to the reliability of opening DWGs. Over the years, I collected a variety of DWGs that gave various releases of AutoCAD some problems. Some of those problems occurred while performing some kind of editing or processing, while others prevented AutoCAD from opening the drawing at all. I was expecting BricsCAD to have all those problems, plus perhaps some additional incompatibilities of its own.

What happened was the opposite. I don’t think I came across a single drawing that AutoCAD could open but BricsCAD couldn’t. On the contrary, BricsCAD was much more forgiving than AutoCAD, breezing through the process of opening drawings that had problems that originated in AutoCAD. Maybe 80-90% of my “problem” drawings were problems for AutoCAD alone. In many cases an AUDIT in BricsCAD and a re-save was enough to make the problem go away in AutoCAD. In other cases I could use BricsCAD to recover the unrecoverable using the traditional methods of WBLOCK, saving as an earlier release, saving as DXF, binary search (I may do a later post on exactly what that means), and so on.

Note that you may be able to obtain similar results using other DWG-based products such as DraftSight, ZWCAD or even the free BricsCAD Shape. However, I don’t have the experience with those products to be able to confirm that. Autodesk’s DWG TrueView, being a cut-down AutoCAD, tends to have the same problems as AutoCAD.

One thing that was particularly pleasant about using BricsCAD to fix problem drawings was the speed at which it could be done, because of BricsCAD’s generally superior performance. Closing and opening AutoCAD is painfully slow these days as the bloat gets worse, so having a product that fires up quickly is very handy.

Also handy is the availability of tools within the product that make it easier to locate and fix problems. Of particular importance is the Drawing Explorer, which provides a consistent and efficient interface that provides access to over 20 different types of aspects of a drawing (e.g. layers, linetypes, text styles, etc.):

One example arose showing how useful this is, when my users were having an intermittent problem with some drawings locking up AutoCAD 2015 on open. Some trial and error made it possible to discover that the trigger for this was the existence of a text style (any text style) with a bigfont attached, where the bigfont SHX file did not exist. It was possible to fix this in an earlier or later AutoCAD release, which the users may or may not have available to them, by opening the drawing, using the STYLE command, then using that dialog box to go through each text style one at a time, looking for bigfonts.

It was much easier to quickly fire up BricsCAD, use the STYLE command which opens the Drawing Explorer in the Text Style section, and see all of the text styles laid out at once (see above). It was very efficient to quickly look for recalcitrant bigfonts and make them go away, or to see instantly that bigfonts weren’t the problem.

Similarly, the consistent, searchable and efficient interface of the BricsCAD Settings dialog makes it easy to check the values of any settings that you suspect may be triggering the problem in AutoCAD:

As a CAD Manager, it’s definitely worth your while to do the quick download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD. My experience in dealing with Bricsys is that requests for extensions for evaluation purposes are usually accepted, so you probably won’t have to give up your valuable tool as soon as your 30 days are up.

Once you’ve determined that it really is an invaluable tool to have around, the cost of entry is low enough to make it relatively easy to justify the investment. You won’t need to recover many drawings to get your money back.

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 3

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Welcome to the second in this series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

David Kingsley has had a long and interesting career, was present in the early days of CAD adoption, and served as an AUGI board member for years. Here is the third and final part of David’s interview. This was the most interesting part of the interview for me, but unfortunately much of the more hilarious anecdotes and other discussions were off the record so I can’t share them. I hope you enjoy what’s left!

Steve: What are you most proud of achieving with AUGI?

David: I have to say AUGIWorld magazine and the website. That’s where the group really took off and looked professional.

Steve: If you could go back in time, what would you do differently with the benefit of hindsight?

David: As you get older you learn a few things. I’d probably be a bit more diplomatic about the changes that they went through, and try to resolve things in another way. I don’t know that it would have done much good. I got pretty arrogant about their turnover. I tried to stick to the facts without getting personal; I would always try to do that. I would try to convey factual information but I went a little over the edge with the campaign against what they were trying to do.

I really have no regrets about anything to do with getting the magazine and website started, and how we set up that agreement with SolidVapor. I think that really put a professional face on AUGI at that point.

Steve: What value do you think Autodesk has received from AUGI? Is it a marketing tool…?

David: Yes and no. Having worked directly with the engineering people, I felt they genuinely wanted to know what the users wanted, at least at that point in time. They used us as a filter, so to speak. We were out there gathering information and we were supposed to put it into a filtered and cohesive form for them to use. That’s what I remember as the mission of the group, which is to be the mouthpiece of the user community to Autodesk.

[Some discussion on Robert Green’s AUGI involvement]

I message with Robert often on Facebook and he’s been to visit my house.

Steve: I finally got to meet Robert after all these years, about six months ago in Paris when we both got invited to the Bricsys Conference. It means I’ve finally got to meet some people I haven’t managed to meet on my travels in the past.

[Some discussion about user group names]

David: The original name of the group was NAAUG (North American AutoCAD User Group) and we switched over to AUGI when we went international. Looking for the new name, we came up with a number of variations and one of them I remember was DAUGP (pronounced Dog Pee)!

Steve: [Spits coffee] That’s a good one!

David: I didn’t think that was a good one.

[Some discussion of user groups in general, Bricsys and BricsCAD]

David: I always like to stay on top of these things, you know? I read Ralph Grabowski’s newsletter all the time and he’s been talking about it [BricsCAD] a lot lately.

[Some discussion of the then-forthcoming bundling of AutoCAD and most verticals and Autodesk’s move to subscription only]

David: I know they’re trying to emulate Adobe’s subscription model. It’s going to be painful for a while but I think they’ll eventually get there. It’s just got to be affordable. But you know, people scream about the price and when I looked into it the cost was about $1.00 to $1.50 an hour based on 2000 hours a year. If you can’t afford $1.50 or $2.00 an hour overhead, you’re in the wrong business!

Steve: Yeah, but every business likes to reduce its overheads and doesn’t like to pay extra overheads. Autodesk is doing what it can to reduce its costs; it’s just sliced its workforce by about 23% in two stages. Nobody likes paying more money than they have to.

[More discussion about perpetual licenses, subscription, maintenance and ADN]

Steve: Do you have any fun stories to tell about your AUGI days?

David: I remember checking in to the MGM Grand for AU and being there for nine days, never even leaving the hotel. We would go in and start setting up AU and we would man the booth and teach classes and then break it down and do a debriefing. I remember one time all of us in a conference room and we all just fell asleep. We folded our arms on the desk, put our heads down, a couple of people got tired and a couple of people kept talking, a couple of people dozed off and sooner or later it was everybody. We were all just flat exhausted. We all woke up and said, “What are we doing here?”

I lived in Denver for many years, a ten hour drive to Las Vegas. It was worth taking the car for a nine-day stay. I think I did that 5 or 6 years running. I remember a few of us had to find a laundromat midweek, and I was the only one with a car. One year I arrived at the MGM about seven one night after this long drive, and it was just jammed to the hilt. I couldn’t even get off the street. I had a lot of stuff and decided to get a valet, because Autodesk would expense stuff like that for us, but I couldn’t get one. It took me an hour to check in. Turned out the Rolling Stones were playing the MGM Grand that night! I was there about two hours before show time.

On the way to my room there were people walking around the arena trying to sell tickets for $350 a seat! I like the Stones but I wasn’t ready to pay that and I’m sure my wife wouldn’t have been happy either.

Another time, I went to a hospitality party with the executives. The suite there had all this dark wood and it looked like a cabin in the Rocky Mountains somewhere, up on the 15th floor of the MGM Grand. All sorts of hors d’oeuvre and wine, I’m sure they paid a bundle for that!

Steve: Yeah, the parties were always fun.

I have a falling asleep story too. I was at AU 2006. I was with Owen Wengerd and we were hanging out at a bar until 1 AM and we were just about to head off to bed when we saw Tony Peach walk past. He was a great guy, passed on a few years ago, but Owen and I both knew him from earlier times. We ended up at a bar talking and it was about 4 AM before we called it a night. The next morning I had a class, I was hoping to learn .NET programming for AutoCAD. I got there and sat down and my eyes glazed over and it was the old dropping off and neck-jerking wake-up thing. That’s the reason I never became a .NET programmer in AutoCAD! I just slept through the class. It was too hard. I gave up.

[We swap a bunch of really funny off-the-record stories – I wish I could share them!]

David: [About Lynn Allen] How can you axe a person like that? She’s kind of the face of the corporation.

Steve: Yup. I don’t understand it. Maybe it’s personal.

David: Yeah. Also there was this thing about age discrimination. A lot of the older folks are wondering whether this had something to do with age. Who knows? Inevitably as you’ve been there a long time your salary climbs and you get expensive after a while, but they probably generate a lot more revenue than they cost.

Steve: I’m sure Lynn generated a lot more revenue than she cost.

David: Yeah. I can imagine next year when some guy in a suit shows up, they’re not going to be happy!

Steve: Well, she’s a drawcard, that’s for sure. And I guess she’s likely to be somebody else’s drawcard soon.

David: That’s true. I understand she’s got offers or at least approaches from all the competitors. Solidworks in particular.

Steve: I wonder if she comes as a package with Heidi Hewett? I understand Heidi wrote a lot of the material.

[Note: this interview took place before Heidi’s move to Bricsys]

David: Yeah, That would be a real coup. Hiedi was her cohort there. I remember watching Heidi teach a class and the software was acting up. I blurted out that a number of mathematicians throughout history have had numbers associated with them like Avagadro, Reynolds and so on. I want to create a Kingsley Factor, as follows: “The efficiency of a piece of software is inversely proportional to the number of eyes looking at the screen.” It always screws up when 50 people are looking at it.

Steve: The curve will show a dip at two people observing, based on my experience in support. I would get a call out about a certain problem and the two words that were guaranteed to fix it were “Show me.”

David: Heidi and her husband Nate lived close to us. We would catch up with them at the local pub from time to time.

Steve: I remember Nate got the shaft [from Autodesk] in about 2009 in an earlier “culling of the unwanted”.

David: Earlier than that, there was another big reduction-in-force and we were there [at Autodesk] and we knew it was going to happen.

Immediately after our board meeting, we left San Rafael and relocated in San Francisco for AU. As I recall that was the year of four AUs. One young Autodesk employee was with us and said, “Well, I got laid off. But! I have a job to finish off through Autodesk University and they didn’t take away my American Express card. So we’re gonna party this week!”

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 1
IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 2

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 2

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Welcome to the second in this series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

David Kingsley has had a long and interesting career, was present in the early days of CAD adoption, and served as an AUGI board member for years. Here is the second part of David’s interview which covers his involvement in AUGI, the controversy over how it was managed, and how that ended his involvement.

Steve: What was your first involvement with AUGI or NAAUG? At what stage did you get involved?

David: I think it was NAAUG in Philadelphia. Paul Jackson came up to me and said, “We would like you to get involved with the board. He asked me to attend the board meeting right there. So I started hanging out. That may have been the first time I met Lynn Allen. David Harrington was there, Dave Espinosa-Aguilar, Donnia Tabor-Hanson… that was kind of the formation of a very early AUGI Board. They had a board, but they were looking for different people.

I first ran for the AUGI board and was elected in 1996. I was on the Board from 1996 to 2002. We didn’t have a web site in 96, not many small organizations did yet, so I was involved in the first AUGI website ever. It was pretty crude! I remember we just kind of talked about it, Carol Bartz waved her hands, and we had money! She would sit in for a couple of hours every time we met in San Rafael. We would spend three or four days at Autodesk and that’s when we would develop our annual plan and funding requirements.

They were throwing a lot of money at us – $150,000, $200,000 a year just to support the user community. So we had a pretty healthy budget. A lot of people bungled it though. I remember one year we had budgeted $80,000 for something. It was what became the Exchange, where everybody traded their apps. We were supposed to develop that and we completely failed. We directly experienced the wrath of Carol Bartz for that.

The AUGI Board was a really difficult thing to make work because everyone was a volunteer, and they were all over the country, and there were no consequences for failure. People would sometimes just blow stuff off and wouldn’t do things. We were unable to accomplish things. They lacked the skills, or desire, or didn’t have the time, so there were some really rough years there where we were supposed to get things done and we didn’t. We had a couple people who openly stated they were just there to get NFR software.

That was when Rich Uphus and SolidVapor became involved. I believe Carol Bartz set us up with them to give us some kind of essential management. That was when AUGIWorld magazine came out. When we got involved with them, Uphus rebranded his “A” magazine as AUGIWorld and started to plan all of the CAD Camps. At that point, Autodesk ceased funding AUGI directly.

Steve: Is this the quarterly CAD Camps?

David: Yes, but I think there were 40 of them one year. Yoshi Honda and I were kind of the key AUGI people who negotiated that with Rich Uphus. We did most of the conceptual development and business arrangement between AUGI and Uphus. SV put together the first workable AUGI website with our input. All of that happened because of SolidVapor.

The plan was that AUGI provided the technical content and SV built and maintained the infrastructure – the website, the magazine, the organization behind the CAD Camps. When you start to think about the expense of that – If you went up to some hotel and said, “I’d like to have five breakout rooms, I’d like to serve lunch to 200 people, for a day and a half,” they would say, “Well, put down $200,000 and we’ll reserve a spot for you.”

For one or more years, CAD Camps had more attendees per year than Autodesk University. So SolidVapor had to come up with a lot of capital – millions of dollars. SV was going through $2.5 to $3 million a year. I’m sure they were making a profit; that’s what businesses are about. But they were pretty much backed by Autodesk.

AUGI generated no revenue at all. They were actually an expense. Autodesk flew us out to San Rafael for a week twice a year and we just partied! They took us out to nice restaurants. But we also provided a lot of good information from the user community, so we were the mouthpiece of the user community to Autodesk.

Later on there was a faction within the AUGI board that didn’t like the arrangement that we had with SolidVapor. They felt that AUGI was no longer in control – that SolidVapor was doing all the stuff that AUGI should be doing. There was a real split. My position was that it became that way because the model we had earlier didn’t work. Autodesk was giving us money and we were failing, so they put a real organization, an experienced business, in place to accomplish what they wanted. We were in a position where we drove that organization but we didn’t manage the money, we didn’t really manage the projects.

AUGI chose to terminate the contract with SolidVapor. Some may say otherwise, but the fact is they offered SV a deal they could not accept. I tried and tried to make sense with them, tried to tell them early on that… first of all, where is your money going to come from? Autodesk has told us they will not fund AUGI like they did before, they will only be another ad buying customer. All of this cash flow is going to go away when you end this relationship. Don’t tell me that you’re going to come up with $2.5 to $3 million a year, it’s just not going to happen. You guys don’t know how to do it, you’re working full time jobs, and you’re already unable to fulfill many of your responsibilities to AUGI. You expect to, all of a sudden, on a part-time basis, raise $2.5 to $3 million a year and put together a dozen CAD Camps, publish a magazine and keep a website running. It’s just isn’t going to happen.

But they went ahead and did it anyways. That’s when I left AUGI. I didn’t want to be involved with what was going to happen. I don’t have any personal grudges against people but there were a couple of people I really bumped heads with. Let’s just say we didn’t talk to one another after that.

I remember going to Autodesk University after they had terminated the relationship with SolidVapor and I knew they were in serious financial trouble. They had relatively no financial backing or sales, they had no viable plan. That’s when CAD Camps ended, AUGI World magazine ended, and the website stumbled really badly for a couple of years. It was in pretty bad shape. AUGI has pretty much gotten themselves back on track now, but at a much smaller scale than it could have been.

Steve: Wasn’t there some legal wrangle over who had rights to the forums and the contents?

David: Yeah. AUGI didn’t have any direct revenue. They had not invested anything. SolidVapor managed all the money, and the agreement was that SolidVapor would provide the infrastructure. So SV built the website, invested all the time, they were paying for the servers, paying the programmers, all that stuff. I tried to tell the AUGI board that they had no power whatsoever. Sorry, but power is money. You don’t control any money. You haven’t invested in this so you really don’t have a right to it. You provided the content for the forums, yes. The position of SolidVapor was, if you sue us for the forums and win, you’ll take responsibility for the whole thing. You’ll be totally responsible for funding and operating the website, the servers, the programmers.

AUGI was never restricted about what we could publish or what we could do, other than technical limitations. They would do pretty much whatever we wanted to, within reason. But we never paid for anything so we never had any power there.

I was pretty much against the whole AUGI position at that point, I thought they were unrealistic. They all had full time jobs, some of them were highly placed in engineering departments, but no one really had any business experience.

A lot of the things they wanted to do were just not practical or cost-effective. So we had some real head-butting with SolidVapor about what AUGI wanted to do. SV said, “We can’t do that, we can’t afford it,” or “Come up with a budget for it.” AUGI was just kind of waving their hands around and asking for things and they didn’t think about how much it was going to cost or how it was going to get paid for.

So they struggled for a while. I’ve been out of touch – I’ve really not been involved with AUGI since 2008 when they terminated the SV relationship. That’s when I said adios.

Steve: I still have the document that you produced with all your record of that I can now refer to. It’s still on my blog!

David: Oh really? I think it would pretty much corroborate what I just said.

Steve: If you remember, you published that on the AUGI forums and that was removed and so I published it on my blog for people that wanted to read what you had to say. I don’t know if you remember that or not but it’s still there!

David: Yeah, yeah!

Steve: I just downloaded it for my own blog to read it!

David: I think there are a few people who can remember those days. I had very few supporters. I actually got some hate mail. I was amazed at the lack of understanding in the community at what was going on. Nobody got it. I had a few communications with people shortly afterward but not many. It was surprising.

AUGI survived, it just went to a much smaller scale. You’re probably pretty familiar with that whole scenario then?

Steve: Yeah, I came on it fairly late and I didn’t really understand what was going on either, except that there was there was a bit of a constitutional crisis with the board and who was supposed to be on the board, and who gets to say who’s on the board. There was an election and the election was cancelled or postponed or moved and people weren’t allowed to put themselves up for election and all sorts of stuff happened.

David: Yeah. I kind of went over the edge a little bit with some stuff at that point. I did have a really serious discussion with the board, because I’d been off the board for a number of years and I decided to go back and put myself up as a candidate. They wouldn’t even allow me to run as a candidate. It might have been ’08 or ’09. I said I’d like to run and they said no. That didn’t really get any press. That was kind of a private thing between me and…

Mark Kiker and Richard Binning were the two people I really butted heads with. They were the two that really spearheaded this transition, so they told me flat out, you’re not running. You’re not going to get on the board. That was where the noise about who gets to be on the board came from. They were pretty dictatorial. It was pretty interesting to watch.

Steve: Within AUGI, when you were actively involved in it, who are you dealing with at Autodesk? I know you mentioned Carol came to the meetings. Were there other people that you were interacting with?

David: We dealt directly with a lot of the engineering department there. I dealt with Buzz Kross a lot. During the weeks that we spent at Autodesk, we would work directly with the engineering people. It was timed such that they could talk to us directly about what was coming up and we were tasked with thinking about how to introduce that to the user community. We were tasked to provide feedback to them, that’s where the wish list originated. We were tasked to become the mouthpiece of the user community.

Carl Bass was still in engineering management, so we dealt with him a lot. Then there was Lynn. We worked with her a lot. Lynn was the one who worked the internal politics and made things happen for us. We gave her the official title of “AUGI Sweetheart”.

I just thought about this a couple of days ago. I lived in Denver, very close to Columbine High School where there was that big mass shooting where two kids shot up the High School and killed 19 people. A couple of kids on my street went to that school, but we didn’t have any children there. I remember sitting down in Carol Bartz’ office; I’d asked for a private meeting with her. I talked to her about the effects of violent video games and what influence Autodesk might have on that. We actually came to know one another at a more personal level at that point. It was an interesting relationship after that.

We used to sit down with all of the top management people. There would be a formal meeting every time the AUGI board met. All of the big kids would show up and all of the AUGI kids were round the other side of the table. We’d sit there for two, three or four hours and have a really nice long discussion about the product and the future. They’d tell us about future developments, what was coming up and we all had NDAs so we couldn’t talk about anything outside.

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 1
IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 3

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 1

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Welcome to the second in this series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

David Kingsley has had a long and interesting career, was present in the early days of CAD adoption, and served as an AUGI board member for years. Here is the first part of David’s interview, which covers his career.

It’s a long career, so this is a loooong post! Strap in tight for a candid discussion of solar plants, a couple of US Presidents, primeval Autodesk University, Autodesk before and after Lynn Allen, a personal opinion of the current CEO, sailing on an America’s Cup yacht, the Hubble telescope and an inappropriate discussion of hard nipples.

Steve: You’re retired now, right?

David: I’m 67 soon and pretty much retired, but I’m still keeping up with AutoCAD and Inventor, my two primary things. I use Inventor pretty regularly. We’re going to build an addition on the house and I’m still up to speed on it. I’ve been on ADN (Autodesk Developer Network) for years and years; I’m still doing that. But yeah, I’m retired. I say I’ve become unemployable!

Steve: Can you give me a brief outline of the main things you’ve done during your long career?

David: I started out on a drafting board in 1970 and had 10 or 11 years of experience with that. I grew up West of Detroit; the whole southern part of Michigan is automotive industry. You know, Detroit iron. I worked a lot in automotive tooling, all on paper and pencil.

Then in ’78 I moved from Detroit to Denver, Colorado and was there for 40 years until just last month. In 1976, then-President Carter commissioned a Solar Energy Research Institute and I went around and visited all of the candidate cities for this new Institute and it ended up in Denver. I had visited and interviewed with the company there, and this was even before the Institute had been officially commissioned and opened. So this company called me back and moved me all the way across the country and I went to work for them. They built equipment, so the Institute is like a think-tank and they contracted out to manufacturers around the area. We built a lot of hardware. So I was building solar energy R&D stuff back in 1980/81.

Then Regan got elected and he was anti-solar and he cut all of those programs so I ended up being out of a job after a couple of years. So I ended up in aerospace. There were two or three big aerospace companies in Denver. Long story short, I ended up working on the Hubble telescope. That was still working on paper and pencil!

In ’81 we got CAD training, they brought in a big CAD system. I got pretty adept at that. It was about ’84 or ’85, AutoCAD started to pop up and PCs were just starting to appear. Literally showing up on people’s desks. I immediately took off on that; I could see that was where everything was headed.

I hooked up with my first Autodesk University in, was it 92? One of the really very first AUs, and I remember it was in the parking lot, there on McInnis Street. They had a little tent; there were only a couple of hundred people there.

Steve: Sorry David, which city was this?

David: This is in San Rafael, right at the Autodesk headquarters, there on McInnis Street [Parkway]. Ever been out there?

Steve: Yes.

David: And everybody stays at that Embassy…?

Steve: Embassy Suites, yes. Good breakfasts!

David: Yes, and this was in that parking lot. They had a tent and grilled hamburgers and hot dogs and ten classes. I don’t think Lynn Allen worked there yet. I can’t remember her being there.

Steve: Wow!

David: I remember Autodesk before Lynn Allen! Now we’re in a world with an Autodesk without Lynn Allen.

Steve: Yes, it’s bizarre, isn’t it?

David: Yes. It’s like the company’s got a whole different… have you spoken with Lynn? Chatted with Lynn about any of this?

Steve: I’ve been in touch. I haven’t spoken to her personally but we’ve sent messages back and forth.

David: It’s pretty ugly. There are a bunch of people who are pretty pissed off. This Anagnost, the new CEO, a lot of people think there’s a vendetta going on. There’s a lot of people he… I don’t know if you know anything about this Anagnost or have met him before, but I worked with him over the years. He was an OK guy but he was just a real cold… you know, I don’t know how to describe him. But a lot of people think there was a lot of animosity, that he’s kind of venting, getting rid of people he didn’t like. Because he came up through the ranks, he’s been there many years.

So anyway, back about me!

Steve: So you went to the first AU at San Rafael?

David: The very first or one of the first. I also remember going to the one in San Francisco, and Phil Kreiker was the President. I remember him making a bunch of rude remarks: an inappropriate monologue! I guess you had to be there. It was the kind of stuff you wouldn’t have expected to hear from somebody…

Steve: I may have actually been there. I went to the ‘95 one in San Francisco at the Moscone Center.

David: I remember one being at the Bill Graham Center. The one where he said he was so excited his nipples were hard! I always remember that.
Was that the one where they brought him in, in a straitjacket?

Steve: Ah, great. No, I didn’t see that, that sounds fun!

David: So you’ve been around this stuff for a long time too?

Steve: Yeah, Version 1.4 was my first AutoCAD. I worked for an AutoCAD dealer, the first AutoCAD dealer, here in Western Australia as the demo jock and sales support and specialist and so on. Yeah, that was ’85.

David: I bought AutoCAD 11. I’d been working on a big mainframe system. Computervision was the big player at the beginning, and they had a model space/paper space paradigm and that was the first thing I worked on in 3D, and it was model space/paper space and AutoCAD was just a flat 2D tool. When they came out with 11, that was when they first came out with paper space. That was a paradigm I was comfortable with, so I ended up buying 11 and left my cushy aerospace job.

I had been there ten years and I had the same job the day I left as the day I got there. It was a big company and it was really difficult to move forward. At that time the IT guys were managing the CAD system. Because it was a computer, you know? And they weren’t figuring out that a CAD Manager and an IT Manager were not the same thing. There were no CAD Managers, they didn’t understand the whole business yet.

So I proposed that I become the first CAD Manager in the place because I saw the job and everybody else kind of saw it, too. So I had to politic for that job for about three years. We were really struggling, we had these IT guys who didn’t know… they just couldn’t support us. We were just floating around, trying to figure out our methods and operations and the IT guys weren’t any help at all.

So finally after three years, my boss got a promotion and I got a new boss and he immediately said, “I know what you’re talking about and I’m going to go to Human Resources and fight for this position.” So they posted it, interviewed three people and gave the job to somebody else!

So I just threw up my hands, went and bought AutoCAD 11 and struck out on my own. We had some guys who spun off from the company earlier and one of them at the time was… the company I worked for, their speciality was optical sensing. They built a lot of Earth observation satellites. They built (and still) some of the most advanced satellite on the planet. As a matter of fact, right now every instrument on the Hubble telescope was built by this company. So the last four or five contracts they have won every contract to replace every instrument. Ball Aerospace.

Anyway, a couple of people had spun off that company and I went to work for them. Half a dozen consultants, you know, a small company. This one guy won a contract with the Italian America’s Cup sailing team. His specialty was wind shear detection. He developed a system where the vector and velocity of the wind could be mapped up to 2 km ahead of the craft, and he sold it to the Italians. We were trying to build this thing and put it on the Italian boat. This was in San Diego in ’92 or ’93.

Shortly before the race, the sanctioning body ruled it out. We spent all this money and they said, “Nah, you can’t do that.” Apparently the rule was, you couldn’t communicate with the boat. So they couldn’t communicate ship to shore. What I remember is that we were gathering our own data autonomously. But they said, “Nah, you still have such an advantage.” I actually got on the boat for a short time. I learned very quickly that if you’re not part of the racing team you’re just in the way. There’s no place for you to be.

So after that I ended up hooking up with the dealer network in Denver, the Rocky Mountain region. This is in the 90s. I would go around and do training with the dealer network. On several occasions I would go in on a long term contract. They would have a big sale, a big installation of a dozen or so seats, and I would go in and be an employee on a contract basis. I would go in and be there like everybody else for three or four months. I’d get them up to speed.

That was always bizarre. There would be a political nightmare. There would be people who didn’t want to be on CAD, or didn’t like this software, they would rather have SolidWorks or something else, and they fought tooth and nail, and it was crazy. There were people who really didn’t like me, just because I represented, I was trying to teach them this software. I told them, “This is not about me! Your management made this decision. If you want to work here you’re going to have to live with it! I’m not the cause of your problems.”

That’s pretty much how I ended my career. I just got tired of that, I didn’t need to work any more and my wife’s career bloomed later in her life, about 45 or 50 and she had a great career from 45 on, so for about 20 years she was really the breadwinner, so I was really the playboy.

Steve: You were a “kept man”!

David: Yeah, I really said that. But I was still working.

I had a couple of really bad experiences at the end. Just a bad employer. We had a solar company that established their North American engineering center in Denver. They built the world’s biggest solar power plant in Arizona. A Spanish company with a North American engineering office. They built several really big solar power plants, but that was a really horrible place to work. We were micromanaged from Spain and they had some of the worst CAD implementations I’ve ever seen. I tried to turn them around, and it was just unbelievable what they were doing. You’re familiar with the technology. Are you civil, or electrical, or…

Steve: Mostly mechanical. I have worked for an architect but my background is in mechanical engineering. I actually started my career at a drop forging company that made a lot of automotive parts, so fairly similar to your start.

David: In my really early days, I worked in a General Motors plant. It had been a bomber plant during World War II, making bomber aircraft. Right underneath my office was a drop forge. It just sat there all day, just WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! My cup of coffee was always wiggling! It was never still, it always had a wave in it.

Back to this company, they were managing Inventor files like AutoCAD files, with the revision letter changing the file name. That broke the assembly in Inventor, but they couldn’t get that concept. There was this confrontation thing and they quietly walked me out the door. They gave me a really nice letter that basically said, “Just go away.”

I said, “I really don’t want to do this any more” so I stopped working. That was about 2011.

There was one more job I had after that. I worked in a company that was using Inventor and made ambulance helicopters. They would take a standard helicopter, fully fitted, with every component certified, and tear it apart, strip it out. We would build new panels and fit all this medical equipment. That was probably the best paying job I ever had! But that’s when I got tired of it. That was a young man’s job and I was 62 or 63. They wanted me to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week and I just couldn’t do it.

So I gave it up!

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 2
IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 3

Steve’s BLADE presentation at the BricsCAD New Zealand and Australia Roadshow

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Sofoco (Australia) and CAD Concepts (New Zealand) recently ran a series of seminars throughout Australasia demonstrating BricsCAD. I attended the last of these in Brisbane on April 19 and gave a presentation about BricsCAD’s LISP, with reference to AutoCAD compatibility and the tools available to CAD Managers and developers, including BLADE. The talk was aimed at anybody who is writing or maintaining LISP code for AutoCAD or BricsCAD.

I had the just-before-lunch slot, which is never desirable for a presenter. People are dozing off and/or bursting to go to the toilet, and time adjustments have to be made if earlier presentations run over. I started 10 minutes late and therefore had to remove the demonstration part of the presentation on the fly, but I had planned to allow for that eventuality. It’s been a while since I have presented like this before an audience so I was a bit rusty and it wasn’t as free-flowing as I would have liked. Too many ‘erms’!

Steve’s invisible accordion is impressively large

I did manage to keep the whole audience in their seats until the end, though, so that’s something. Maybe the fact that I was waving a sword around had something to do with it.

Here’s my video, which is 21 minutes long. The sound is a bit muffled and my accent is Australian, so you might want to turn on subtitles using the CC option in the YouTube player.

Disclosure: the organisers covered part of my expenses.

Autodesk remotely killswitches AutoCAD licenses – again

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Following the AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster, where subscription users found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken by an Autodesk licensing system meltdown, Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost issued an apology. He also assured customers on Twitter that it wouldn’t happen again:

While I welcomed that, I did have this to say at the time:

I don’t think such a guarantee is realistic, given that the nature of subscription software is to only work when it knows you’ve paid up. At least it demonstrates that the desire is there right at the top to try to prevent such debacles from occurring in future.

Autodesk watchers know that words mean little and actions are everything. I look forward to Andrew sharing news of the actions he’ll be taking to make good on his promise.

Back to the present. Does it come as a surprise to anybody to discover that less than a month later, Autodesk has again accidentally remotely killswitched people’s licenses? Again, not just the new release, but 2018 too. As reported on Twitter and www.asti.com:

After a couple of exchanges, the always-responsive people on the @AutodeskHelp Twitter feed came back with this:

So it’s fixed, but CAD Managers now have a bunch of work to do at their end to deal with a problem created at the Autodesk end. Somebody screwed up, they fixed it, another apology is issued, stuff happens, life goes on.  That’s it for this month, probably. But it doesn’t address a very fundamental problem.

Let’s go back to basics.

The primary function of a licensing system is to allow use of the product by legitimate users.

Everything else is secondary. If a system relies on phoning home and getting the required response from a remote system before you’re permitted to use the software you paid for, not just after installation but on an ongoing basis, then it’s fundamentally flawed from the user’s point of view. Yet that is the system that Autodesk has chosen to base its business on.

No amount of sincere, deeply felt apologies or it’ll-never-happen-again promises will alter the fact that Autodesk has put its own convenience ahead of the ability of paying customers to use what they have paid for. Will Autodesk change that state of affairs? I very much doubt it, in which case it’s inevitable that this kind of thing will happen again, whatever anyone might promise.

The game has changed – Robert Green migrates to BricsCAD

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Is anybody left who still thinks BricsCAD isn’t a serious replacement for AutoCAD? If that’s you, perhaps the latest news might make you take it seriously. No, not the Heidi Hewett news. Even more recent news than that!

Robert Green, CAD Management guru, Cadalyst writer and consultant (not to mention a rather good guitarist) has been announced as the first Bricsys Certified Migration Consultant.

Image courtesy of Bricsys

Read all about what Robert has to say on this Bricsys blog post.

Anybody who has been reading this blog for the last few years will be surprised by none of what Robert has to say in that blog post. It’s not merely a repeat of what I’ve been saying for some time now, it’s all factually correct and easily verifiable by any competent CAD Manager.

I’ve been there and done that. I’ve gone through the process of taking a very complex custom AutoCAD environment, applying it to BricsCAD and giving it to my users. They loved it. No training was required to work as usual. Most things happened quicker, more conveniently, or both, starting right from the speedy installation. Once the product is in place and established, training can then be applied to take advantage of the places where BricsCAD is ahead of AutoCAD.

If you’re a CAD Manager where AutoCAD is used and you haven’t checked out BricsCAD yet, it’s about time you did.

This might come as a shock to those who see Autodesk domination of DWG CAD as a permanent fact of life, but the game has changed. AutoCAD’s stagnation and comments by senior figures show that the former flagship is clearly unloved by the powers within Autodesk. AutoCAD LT, even more so. An unimpressive AutoCAD 2019 shows that major improvements can no longer be expected in exchange for your ever-increasing annual payments, and with large numbers of people having been offloaded from the research and development teams, who would do it anyway? Meanwhile, BricsCAD development shoots ahead.

Thanks to decades of hostility towards customers that has only accelerated in recent years, Autodesk can’t even rely on customer loyalty for survival. When there’s a serious competitor that offers an easy migration path, the inertia that has kept Autodesk alive so far in the DWG space is no longer enough. The feeling among industry observers I meet is that Autodesk is in a decline of its own making. The only debate is whether that decline is temporary or terminal.

Back to Robert et al. Autodesk has lost many good people, and Bricsys is gaining them. The momentum is clearly with the Belgian company. Anybody want to run bets on who the next big name defector will be?

Still can’t download AutoCAD 2019? Read this

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Timeline of AutoCAD 2019 events to date

    • 20 March 2018 – Somebody (a reseller?) posts a video on YouTube with a collection of Autodesk video materials describing AutoCAD 2019; this is quickly removed
    • 22 March 2018 – AutoCAD 2019 Released
    • 22 March 2018 – Reports surface of AutoCAD 2019 activation acting as a killswitch for AutoCAD 2018
    • 23 March 2018 – Attempts by myself and others to download AutocAD 2019 are thwarted by the non-availability of links and other issues
    • 24 March 2018 – AVA, Autodesk Account and Autodesk desktop app all know nothing about AutoCAD 2019
    • 24 March 2018 – I report on the various problems including the killswitch issue and lack of download availability
    • 25 March 2018 – subscription customers report up to 2.5 days of AutoCAD 2018 downtime
    • 27 March 2018 – Andrew Anagnost’s apology assures customers the issue is resolved (which of the issues he means is not specified but the context might imply it’s the killswitch one)
    • 29 March 2018 – The Autodesk forums still contain the warning that disruptions to managing users, assigning permissions and downloading software are ongoing
    • 3 April 2018 – Autodesk Account still fails to report availability of AutoCAD 2019 for multiple customers under active maintenance, subscription and enterprise agreement contracts


What to do if you want to get hold of AutoCAD 2019? Well, you can download the free trial version here. I wouldn’t recommend it, though, because that forces you to install and use the nasty Autodesk/Akamai download manager. Kill it with fire. This unpleasant fact now applies to all of Autodesk’s trial downloads, cutting off that formerly useful workaround for Autodesk’s download issues.

To get a straightforward malware-free browser download, you’re going to have to say hello to AVA (Autodesk Virtual Assistant). Yes, AVA is utterly useless at answering support questions and until very recently had no clue about the existence of AutoCAD 2019, but the latter issue is now resolved and you can use AVA as your workaround.

Steps to downloading with AVA

  1. Click this link to get to AVA.
  2. Log on with your Autodesk sign-in if you’re not already signed in.
  3. Type AutoCAD 2019 download [Enter].
  4. Pick Yes.
  5. On the right, pick Next.
  6. Select your operating system and language, then pick Next.
  7. Pick the link under Browser Download.

The download should then start. The AutoCAD 2019 Windows 64 download is 1.7 GB but this will expand to more than another 5 GB before the installation proper takes place, after which the installed software will take up about another 2 GB. If you’re using a low-capacity SSD as your primary drive you might want to check you have enough space before you start.

Why One AutoCAD is smart strategy

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OK, so Autodesk may have blown the AutoCAD 2019 rollout, triggering an apology from CEO Andrew Anagnost.

OK, AutoCAD 2019 may have the smallest set of significant advances in the history of AutoCAD releases. If you’re wondering, I give it 1/10. The “there can be only one” hype could easily refer to meaningful improvements to the product per year. This year’s improvement is… drawing compare!

Still, AutoCAD 2019 is a significant release for reasons beyond the content of the core product. An examination of the One AutoCAD strategy reveals a collective corporate mind that’s smarter than it’s being given credit for.

In case you’ve missed it, the idea behind One AutoCAD is that if you subscribe to AutoCAD, you can now also get a bunch of vertical variants of AutoCAD thrown in, renamed as “Toolsets”. You need to ask for it, and it’s for renters only, no perpetual license owners need apply. Oh, and Civil 3D isn’t part of the deal.

This concept has been received less than enthusiastically among respected independent observers such as Ralph Grabowski and Robert Green. I’m going to go against the trend a little and point out several ways in which this is a smart move for Autodesk.

  • It represents the first time Autodesk has had anything of substance to positively differentiate between maintenance and subscription. Until now, it’s all been negative: give away your perpetual licenses to avoid forthcoming maintenance price increases.
  • It provides some substance to Dr Anagnost’s “give us a year to show the value of subscription” request to customers. OK, it may have taken a lot more than a year, but at least it’s now possible to point to something that customers can gain by subscribing, rather than having the embarrassment of an empty promise hanging around.
  • It acts as an effective distraction from yet another price rise (7% on top of Autodesk’s already sky-high subscription costs). Yes, this new price still applies even if you don’t use the toolsets. Yes, it still applies even if you’re a Mac user who doesn’t have these toolsets available.
  • It will almost certainly be used as justification for future subscription price rises. How can you complain about a few more dollars when you get all those products included in the price?
  • This stuff has already been developed to a point that Autodesk considers mature (web apps excluded), and it isn’t costing Autodesk anything to “give it away”.
  • It means that the glacial or non-existent rate of improvement of AutoCAD and its variants suddenly appears less important. How can you complain that nothing worthwhile has been added to your AutoCAD variant this year when you now have access to hundreds more commands than you used to have? This line has already been tried with me on Twitter.
  • It provides a marketing counter-argument against competitors who sell DWG-based AutoCAD-compatible products that provide above-AutoCAD standards of functionality (e.g. BricsCAD).
  • If an increased number of users start using the vertical variants, there will be increased pressure on those competitors to handle the custom objects created using those variants. This will act as a distraction and reduce the ability of those competitors to out-develop Autodesk at the rate that has been occurring for the past few years.

There are a couple of flies in Autodesk’s One AutoCAD ointment:

  • Critical mass – it has yet to be seen how many customers are so won over by this concept that they sign up for it. Remember that it’s only available to a minority of customers anyway, and if the bulk of customers remain reluctant to give up their perpetual licenses then all this is moot. If the move-to-rental numbers are small, then the anti-competitive nature of this move is negated. The marketing gains still apply, though.
  • Interoperability – traditionally, the AutoCAD-based verticals add custom objects to the core AutoCAD objects, which when opened in vanilla AutoCAD or another vertical, appear as proxy objects that either don’t appear or will provide very limited access. Improved but still limited access can be provided if Object Enablers are installed. Object Enablers are not always available for the AutoCAD variant you want to use. LT? Mac? Old releases? Forget it.This has always been a highly unsatisfactory arrangement. I have worked for a company that explicitly prohibits drawings containing proxy objects and rejects any it receives, and that has proven to be a smart policy. Also, the vertical variants of AutoCAD have always had hidden DWG incompatibilities built in. AutoCAD 2015 user? Try to use a DWG file that has been created in a 2017 vertical variant. Good luck with that, even though all those releases supposedly use 2013 format DWG. Paradoxically, you can expect to experience much better DWG interoperability with non-Autodesk products and their add-ons than you will with AutoCAD and its verticals, because the non-Autodesk products are forced to work with AutoCAD native objects. It remains to be seen how, when, or even if Autodesk addresses these issues.

In summary, this strategy has potential to significantly benefit Autodesk. Will it work? That will largely depend on how many customers are prepared to put aside their mistrust enough to hand over their perpetual licenses to Autodesk. That mistrust is mighty large (Autodesk’s been working hard for years on building it up) and recent sorry-we-broke-your-rental-software events have reiterated just how valuable those perpetual licenses are.

Autodesk has produced what it considers to be a very attractive carrot. Is it big and juicy enough to attract you?

Andrew Anagnost apology for AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

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Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost has sent an email to customers affected by the AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster that acted as a remote kill-switch for users of earlier releases of subscription software. The email’s subject is We Missed the Mark:

Image credit: R.K. McSwain

Readers of this blog will be aware that Andrew and I have fundamental disagreements on where he has taken the company, but credit where credit is due. An apology was appropriate in this case, and Andrew stepped up and made one.

He has also stated on Twitter that it won’t happen again. I don’t think such a guarantee is realistic, given that the nature of subscription software is to only work when it knows you’ve paid up. At least it demonstrates that the desire is there right at the top to try to prevent such debacles from occurring in future.

Autodesk watchers know that words mean little and actions are everything. I look forward to Andrew sharing news of the actions he’ll be taking to make good on his promise.

AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

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If you’re an AutoCAD user, you may have been intrigued by the news about the new way Autodesk is bundling up AutoCAD 2019 with various verticals (perpetual license owners need not apply). This is Autodesk’s latest attempt to promote its subscription model and raise prices again. 7% this time, but much more to come. But never mind that, the main point is that you’re getting a whole lot of stuff, and who could say that’s not a good thing?

So it’s most unfortunate for Autodesk that the AutoCAD 2019 rollout has been an unmitigated disaster.

My own experiences in trying to download the product were sub-optimal, but I later learned that I was one of the lucky ones. Subscription users not only had problems with AutoCAD 2019, they found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken too, victims of an Autodesk licensing system meltdown. That’s right, the AutoCAD 2019 launch acted as a remote kill-switch for people’s production software.

Perpetual license users were fine, of course. Only subscription customers suffered. There’s a lesson there that should not go unnoticed.

Back to my own experiences, to begin with I couldn’t download AutoCAD 2019 anywhere, despite it being having been announced everywhere some hours earlier. Autodesk Account wasn’t showing 2019, but it was showing this:

The usual workaround method of downloading the free trial wasn’t any better; that was still on 2018. I even tried installing the execrable Autodesk desktop app (temporarily!), but there was no sign of AutoCAD 2019 there either.

I’ve never had any success using Autodesk’s AVA bot for any real questions, but there was a time when it served as a gateway to Akamai-free downloads, so I tried that. Unfortunately, AVA has been “improved” and that once-excellent feature is gone. I did try asking AVA for the download link to AutoCAD 2019, but that didn’t go well.

First attempt:

Second attempt:

I mentioned my difficulties on Twitter and a few hours later the long-suffering but always-professional @AutodeskHelp people offered this:

Despite appearances, this actually turned out to be helpful because by then the product trial download had been fixed and was offering 2019 rather than 2018. I still didn’t see a direct link and against my better judgement tolerated a very temporary installation of Autodesk’s nasty Akamai download manager. About 5 minutes into the download it said it was going to take about 9 hours so I went away and left it. I returned within the hour to find it was finished, so I have no idea how long it actually took. After immediately uninstalling all traces of Akamai and Autodesk desktop app, I was able to start my evaluation.

So how’s the product? Pretty much the same as 2018, except with a better drawing compare tool. Oh, and the icons are better. The first command I ran in the new release reminded me that some things never change. The ancient rectangular pickbox bug popped in to see me, just like an old friend.

I’ve been warmed by the familiar, comforting experience of this and various other early 90s-era bugs and limitations, where the easiest workaround is to use a competitor’s product to do those bits. More on that in a future post.

An hour or so into using the product saw it crash and burn for the first time:

Don’t take my word for it, though; here are some comments from various users, CAD Managers and long-term Autodesk fans, most of whom had a worse time of it than I did. It’s not just AutoCAD; LT and Navisworks are definitely affected and there may be others. Comments here have been reproduced from various sources under fair use; names have been removed to protect the innocent.

I think it is safe to say that Autodesk are having a very bad day. Account and activation issues, subscription access issues, forum login issues, kudos and comments blocked to some users…

I installed the brand new @Navisworks Manage 2019 last night, and this morning I get the “Your trial has expired” !!!

I can safely say that ‘unimpressed’ is my status right now with the licencing idiocy going on. Not only can I not get the 2019 version, but my 2018 version has stopped working too.

Looks like all subscription (not maintenance or legacy) software is affected this way: logging in and out as well as workarounds posted are not working. Now this is a good reason to abandon Autodesk subscription model.

Good news: Autodesk began rollout of 2019 licenses! Bad news: It might break your 2018 licenses.

Hard to imagine this rollout going any worse.
[Autodesk]”Hold my beer….”

2.5 days without AutoCAD available. I just wish Autodesk would have told us so I could have gone on vacation. Instead, I will have to work thru the weekend to make up lost time.

I love Autodesk and their software, but they have just ditched an entire generation of Autodesk ‘rockstars’ and their subscription portal isn’t working. It really doesn’t look good, does it?

my 2018 is hosed on 3 devices

Unfortunately the situation has lasted for nearly 24 hours and no work done. Can we send the bill to Autodesk?

so I thought I’d try and activate LT
LOL

Although some parts of this are supposedly fixed, it’s not over yet. As I type this, people are still reporting problems and Autodesk is still offering apologies:

Even now, AVA is still completely in the dark about the current release of Autodesk’s traditional flagship product.

It’s great to see users helping each other, though. You may find this Autodesk Forum post by Travis Nave useful as an interim workaround. Also, in a marvellous continuation of McNeel’s free service to the AutoCAD (and BricsCAD) LISP community, DOSLib has been made available for AutoCAD 2019 even before many people were even able to get hold of the software it runs on. That’s what I call service!

All in all, this has not the best start to AutoCAD’s brave new world of oneness. How did it go for you?

CAD Panacea tip – startup files in BricsCAD

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One of the things that might initially baffle a CAD Manager or power user when investigating switching from AutoCAD to BricsCAD is how to set up the startup routines. Head over to CAD Panacea for R.K. McSwain’s concise, handy description of how to do it.

Due to BricsCAD’s high level of compatibility, you can maintain a common folder or set of folders containing LISP and other custom files for both applications. That way, you don’t need to do double maintenance during the transition period. I’ve done this successfully in a highly complex custom environment. Some code and other adjustments were required in places, but all but a handful of my hundreds of AutoCAD LISP files worked as-is in BricsCAD with zero effort.

Having added your AutoCAD custom folder(s) to BricsCAD’s search path, I suggest you make a common startup LISP file (e.g. rename your old acaddoc.lsp to something like CADStartupDoc.lsp) and have tiny stub startup LISP files for each application (acaddoc.lsp and on_doc_load.lsp) that each loads the common startup file.

acaddoc.lsp contents:
(load "CADStartupDoc")

on_doc_load.lsp contents:
(load "CADStartupDoc")

You can add error checking and messaging if you like, but if you have control of your environment you probably won’t even need that. If you find you do need any application-specific code, you can just add it or load it from the acaddoc.lsp or on_doc_load.lsp stubs as appropriate.

Guest post (BlackBox) – Why every click counts

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With a bit of tongue in cheek, “This is not only my first guest post on [blog nauseam], it’s also my first guest post on any blog.” Thanks, Steve!

I get to write about one of my favorite AutoCAD features, and share a short personal story.

Yesterday I read Frank Mayfield’s article on time-sensitive Right Click, which made me recall an opportunity to help a new user on a design task the other day. I led them through an approach to mitigate a design issue, noticed they weren’t using time-sensitive Right Click, and asked them why?

User: Why not?

Me: Fair question; because it’s extra clicks.

User: It’s just a few extra clicks.

Me: Correct; every click counts.

User: Yeah, but it only takes a few seconds.

Me: Correct; how many seconds? Do the same task each way and time it.

User: <Does the task each way>… It only takes an extra 6 seconds.

Me: Good. Now extrapolate that; how many times a day do you do this?

User: Oh, all the time! Haha Hundreds of times a day.

Me: Okay, call it 100, because you won’t do that everyday.

User: 6 secs, 100 times a day, is 600 secs, that’s only 10 mins per day.

Me: Correct; extrapolate that over a year: 5 days, 50 weeks.

User: <Does the math>… Holy crap! 2500 mins? 41.7 hrs? That’s more than a week!

Me: Correct; you just cost the owner a week of otherwise billable time in extra right clicks. Get it now?

User: I get it now.

Me: I know.  <Smiles and walks away>  (<— Yes, I smile! A lot actually)

The user has since opted for the more efficient method on their own, and demonstrated this mindfulness for detail in other areas as well.

I show them the trade-offs and let them choose for themselves.

Accountability makes us better, more capable. Owning our decisions and learning from missteps earns respect. Only then do we see what a real team can do. #GetAfterIt

CAD Nostalgia Video

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For the first video in the new cad nauseam YouTube channel, I’ve had a bit of fun. I unearthed a bunch of my old stuff to show you. Does any of this take you back? Enjoy!

That awkward moment when I just failed to create BIM

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I recently updated my resume, and I thought it might be relevant to include an episode from my early career. This post is an expansion on what I had to say about that episode.

I was managing a tiny CAD training and development company, Educad. Much of my time there was spent developing software called NIDIS (originally called NEEDS), a project that was started in 1987 or 1988 with Nixdorf Computer as the client. It was intended to take over the market among first the home building companies of Western Australia, then Australia, then the World!

What’s special about NIDIS is that it was a precursor to BIM. Using a 3D-adapted version of the 2D Educad architectural software within AutoCAD, designs of domestic homes could be efficiently created and infused with a degree of intelligence. This was then linked to the Nixdorf minicomputer-based software that contained pricing and other information about the various building components. This combined system enabled accurate quantity take-offs to be performed.

This was supposed to be a short project, but due to a massive amount of “scope creep” it took two years. I was really pushing the limits of what AutoCAD could be persuaded to do at that time and had to break new ground in several areas. Some of it was a kludge, but I made it work. Finally, the software was essentially completed, with a custom tablet menu (remember those?), full documentation and everything. Nixdorf CAD-spec PCs with big screens, tablets, AutoCAD and NIDIS were installed in the drawing office. It was successfully tested in Beta. The take-offs were very accurate. Everything looked good to go.

Then, two weeks before it was due to go into production, this project died. The building company that was sponsoring it, Mansard Homes, went into liquidation as it struggled unsuccessfully with the combined effects of very high interest rates and bad publicity about poor building quality and cost overruns. Nixdorf dropped the whole project like a hot potato and the product was never sold. I didn’t have any rights to the software and couldn’t do anything with it.

But it was software that was based around a 3D model of a building that contained some intelligent information, albeit extremely crude by today’s standards. I wrote, quite literally, Building Information Modeling software. It was completed in 1989, before the name BIM had even been used. The idea had existed since the mid 70s, but I didn’t know that at the time so I made it up as I went along.

I didn’t actually invent BIM, but I made something that resembled BIM that actually worked. And then it didn’t.

This is easily the most spectacular failure of my career. Still, I’m kind of proud of it.

Edit: for historical context, this video shows an unrelated system that was developed at about the same time as NIDIS.

How to sign your LISP files

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This post follows on from Why digitally sign your LISP files? and How to obtain a digital signature to sign your LISP files.

In the first post, I explained why you might want to digitally sign your LISP files. In the second, I explained how to obtain and install a digital signature. This third and final post in the series assumes you have done all that and now want to sign your files. There are two methods available to you, using a dialog box or command-line interface.

Signing LISP using the AcSignApply.exe dialog box

Autodesk has provided a utility called Attach Digital Signatures for years. This was provided to sign drawings, zip files, etc., but the ability to sign LISP files was added in AutoCAD 2016. Don’t go using the 2015 version or you’ll have a very frustrating time! You can invoke this utility using the Windows Start Menu:

You can also make your own desktop shortcut if you like. The executable is stored at (XXXX is your AutoCAD release number):

C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD XXXX\AcSignApply.exe

AutoCAD doesn’t need to be running when you start the application. Here’s the interface:

Half way down, there is a list of code signing certificates that you can use. You should see the one you obtained and installed earlier in this list. If you don’t see it listed it may not have been installed correctly. It’s possible to install a public key version of a certificate and see it listed in the Windows Certificate Manager, but that won’t help you sign code. You need to install the private key version in order to be able to sign things. If you do the wrong kind of export from your browser, or if you use the wrong browser to obtain and export the certificate, you may have installed the public key version. In such a case, you will need to contact the certificate provider for help. I have found that the online chat help provided by Comodo is excellent in such cases. Yes, I know this because I got it wrong the first time!

Assuming your certificate is visible, click on that line to select it. You can add files to the pane at the top left using the buttons on the right side or by simply dragging and dropping files onto the pane from Explorer. But wait! Before you do that, make sure you have a safe unsigned copy of all your files. Applying the signatures is a modification process; you are left with only the signed version of the files.

LISP files with the LSP, MNL, FAS, or VLX file extensions can be selected and dragged into the pane. As mentioned in the first post, there’s a bug in the original iterations of AutoCAD 2016 and AutoCAD 2018 that prevents signed VLX files from working, so I would advise against creating them. If you need to distribute signed DCL-based code and don’t want the LISP source visible, you will need to provide a signed FAS instead, along with a DCL file that’s either provided alongside the FAS or created on the fly by your code. Yes, this is a pain.

Note that at the time of writing, you can’t sign CUI, CUIx, DVB, JS, PGP and SCR files.

Once you have selected the certificate to use and the files to sign, select a source for the time stamp and enter a description in the Comment box (optional). Pick the Sign Files button and you’re done.

Signing LISP using the AcSignTool.exe command-line utility

This utility isn’t provided with AutoCAD, but you can download it here. It doesn’t require AutoCAD, which means you can sign LISP files even if you don’t have a copy of AutoCAD 2016 or later.

Once you have downloaded and unzipped the file, place the files somewhere handy. If you make a shortcut to cmd.exe that starts in that location, you can run this command to see all the options:

acsigntool.exe /?

Usage is usually as follows:

AcSignTool -sign /file:[inputfile] /cert:[certificate] /time:[timestamp] /comment:[description]

Here’s an example:

AcSignTool -sign /file:"X:\ToSign\MyCode.lsp" /cert:abcdef1234567890 /time:1 /comment:Hello

The resultant file should be the same as with the dialog box interface. If it’s a raw LISP file, a large comment like this will be placed at the bottom of the file:

;;;-----BEGIN-SIGNATURE-----
;;; /gcAADCCB/oGCSqGSIb3DQEHAqCCB+swggfnAgEBMQ8wDQYJKoZIhvcNAQELBQAw
;;; IE1hbmNoZXN0ZXIxEDAOBgNVBAcTB1NhbGZvcmQxGjAYBgNVBAoTEUNPTU9ETyBD
;;; CwYJKoZIhvcNAQcBoIIFQzCCBT8wggQnoAMCAQICEQCyNMZT2aa05avqeC3j+F3p
;;; YQBuAGQAYQByAGQAcwAgAGEAbgBkACAAVABlAGMAaABuAG8AbABvAGcAeQAgACgA
;;; MA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBCwUAMH0xCzAJBgNVBAYTAkdCMRswGQYDVQQIExJHcmVhdGVy
;;; QSBMaW1pdGVkMSMwIQYDVQQDExpDT01PRE8gUlNBIENvZGUgU2lnbmluZyBDQTAe
;;; bnB31gkc9o/M8YjPdGVjQG0VS96RVf/WtkmGugV2n1Fv4wWXBLA7n410yglqSZh9
;;; NOK2Ya1KFx4trccIHV1oAFN+BCKzSf6J/HdVkmCcy4TEPcrxSzZsi//slm2o9EHl
;;; mwdm6Quhw1wMT8+iRmJNO4ofwuKfBwyE28ZIK4q+zorJPNwiK2o43CmNJViU5SQD
;;; M9ImVtHTTtdAR1Iln+wEtg/4xgwj5KWuxoUJ22OJ/K0A8IcnxqGBujCBtwYDVR0O
;;; Fw0xNzEwMDQwMDAwMDBaFw0yMTEwMDQyMzU5NTlaMIGAMQswCQYDVQQGEwJBVTEN
;;; MAsGA1UEEQwENjE1NTELMAkGA1UECAwCV0ExEjAQBgNVBAcMCVdpbGxldHRvbjEV
;;; A1UdHwQ8MDowOKA2oDSGMmh0dHA6Ly9jcmwuY29tb2RvY2EuY29tL0NPTU9ET1JT
;;; QUNvZGVTaWduaW5nQ0EuY3JsMHQGCCsGAQUFBwEBBGgwZjA+BggrBgEFBQcwAoYy
;;; aHR0cDovL2NydC5jb21vZG9jYS5jb20vQ09NT0RPUlNBQ29kZVNpZ25pbmdDQS5j
;;; MYGvBIGsOAAyADsAMgAvADEAMAAvADIAMAAxADgALwA4AC8AMgA2AC8AMQA3AC8A
;;; TgBhAHQAaQBvAG4AYQBsACAASQBuAHMAdABpAHQAdQB0AGUAIABvAGYAIABTAHQA
;;; dABpAG0AZQAtAGEALgBuAGkAcwB0AC4AZwBvAHYAKQAAAA==
;;; -----END-SIGNATURE-----

Because it’s a comment, it will be ignored by AutoCAD releases prior to 2016, and by other AutoLISP-compatible CAD applications such as BricsCAD and ZWCAD.

References:
Signing your application modules for AutoCAD 2016 – Part 1 – Kean Walmsley
Signing your application modules for AutoCAD 2016 – Part 2 – including various other references
To Digitally Sign an AutoLISP File – Autodesk Knowledgebase article

How to obtain a digital signature to sign your LISP files

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In an earlier post, I explained why you might want to digitally sign your LISP files. If you decide to go ahead with that, then this post explains how you can obtain and install the digital signature you will need to sign your files. This is the most difficult part of the process and it involves spending money.

Getting a digital signature

Although you can make your own digital signature (there’s an Autodesk Knowledgebase article describing the process), there’s little point in doing this. You can sign your files, sure, but that signature won’t be seen as trusted by software that checks for it. Anybody can create a signature like that, including one that impersonates you, and it doesn’t prove anything. The only purpose for such a home-made signature would be to test the methods you’ll be using to apply a proper trusted signature later.

Edit: if you do want to make your own signature, BlackBox informs me that the MakeCert tool in the Windows SDK mentioned in the Knowledgebase article is deprecated. He suggests using this PowerShell Cmdlet instead.

You’re going to need a signature that is trusted. That means you’re going to have to pay somebody trustworthy to trust you. There are a set of certifying authorities, trusted by Microsoft, Autodesk, etc. who can issue code signing certificates to companies and people. You need to prove who you are to one of those authorities and pay them to certify that you are who you say you are. So before you start, make sure you or your business are visible in terms of directory listings, publicly visible phone numbers, etc. If you are representing a company asking for a certificate, you can expect to be asked to produce evidence that you really represent that company. You can expect to confirm that your email and phone number are really under your control.

You only need to do this once a year, or even once every several years if you pay in advance. You might find that the evidence you need to provide changes at renewal time; for example a Yellow Pages listing that was OK in 2015 was no longer accepted when I renewed in 2017, so I had to register my business with another listing.

In my search for a certifying authority, I found that K Software, a reseller for Comodo, was the cheapest source for a code signing certificate, see here. An OV certificate will be fine for signing LISP.

K Software takes your money (USD $67 to $84 a year depending on the length of time you need), gets Comodo to provide the certificate, and provides a handy tool (KSign) that allows you to simply apply the certificate to various files without some of the messing about that’s otherwise required. It’s not useful for LISP files, though. Comodo also provides the support, and I’m happy to report that in my experience their customer service is excellent.

Note: it’s important that you pay close attention to the instructions when applying for your certificate. For example, the browser you use to apply for the certificate is vital. Choose one that’s suggested (e.g. Firefox) and which you expect to use later to obtain the certificate.

Installing a digital signature

Once your evidence is accepted and your payment has gone through, you will be sent an email with a special code, allowing you to obtain the certificate. It’s important that you’re using the same browser on the same computer that you used when applying for the certificate.

Once you click the link and obtain the certificate, you’ll want to export it. In Firefox 58.0, use Options > Privacy & Security and scroll to the bottom to see View Certificates. Select the certificate and pick Export. This will create a .P12 file that you can back up and install on this or another computer. To install the certificate, double-click the .P12 file and follow the prompts to assign it to the current user in the default location (Personal).

That’s it. You should now have a certificate installed that you will be able to use to sign LISP and other files. To check this, start the Windows Certificate Manager (C:\Windows\System32\certmgr.msc). Have a look in Current User > Personal > Certificates and you should find your newly installed certificate.

The next post in this series will explain how to apply this digital signature to your LISP files. That’s the easy bit.